New Books in Critical Theory

In It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies (Hachette Go, 2023) eating disorder specialist and storyteller Jessica Wilson challenges us to rethink what having a "good" body means in contemporary society. By centering the bodies of Black women in her cultural discussions of body image, food, health, and wellness, Wilson argues that we can interrogate white supremacy's hold...

What Is to Be Done? In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conversation. This was the revolutionary tradi...

Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (MIT Press, 2023) by Dr. Mary Flanagan & Dr. Mikael Jakobsson is a striking analysis of popular board games' roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative...

Ever since Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, non-violent resistance has held a special place in the public imagination. What can be better after all than forcing political change without the violence that so often accompanies it. But the Gandhi and King stories are so powerful they can perhaps crowd out other aspects of non-violent resistance. Many of these aspects have been explored by Julie...

The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable.  The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom (U California Press, 2023) argues that mu...

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true t...

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left ...

Today’s book is: Engage in Public Scholarship: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Dr. Alex D. Ketchum. Public scholarship—sharing research with audiences outside of academic settings—has become increasingly necessary to counter the rise of misinformation, fill gaps from cuts to traditional media, and increase the reach of important scholarship. Engaging in these efforts often...

Max Liboiron founder of Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist, anti-colonial laboratory talks about making better science and how they aren’t interested in dismantling the masters house (because who cares about that place) but they definitely are taking those tools. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArg...

Why do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Policy & Race at King’s College London, examines the often hidden and subtle rules that underpin the long-term existence of racism. The book draws on a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data to craft individual narratives that illustrate the opera...

Jeffrey joins the podcast to discuss the prevalence of English in the academic ecosystem and in research publishing. Jeffrey critiques the lackadaisical approach US institutions take towards Spanish language content and research and makes a strong argument to follow the Puerto-Rican model which sees greater opportunity, equality, and sophistication in multilingual academic research. About his book...

This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums (University of California Press, 2022) is about a young man, Marley, and a particular place, the Southern California Library--an archive of radica...

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023) makes the counterintuitive case t...

How can the arts make the world a better place? In Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference (Policy Press, 2022), Frances Howard, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University, analyses the opportunities for social change and social justice offered by youth arts programmes. The book combines a detailed ethnography...

Black people and people with disabilities in the United States are distinctively disadvantaged in their encounters with the health care system. These groups also share harsh histories of medical experimentation, eugenic sterilizations, and health care discrimination. Yet the similarities in inequities experienced by Black people and disabled people and the harms endured by people who are both Blac...

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes. In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Prog...

Does China show that capitalism works better without democracy? What can be done to secure the future of open societies in which there is wealth, tolerance and stability. Martin Wolf - associate editor of the Financial Times and its chief economist - has been thinking about these big questions for his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen...

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how...

Let’s talk about zombies! Scholars Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have produced an engaging and important analysis of the idea of zombies, and how and why these particular monsters are omnipresent in American popular culture, especially these days. Zombies both represent and present ideas about the world in which we live, and Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines...

Shannon Philip's book Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the gendered story of a changing India through the lives of its young middle class men. Through time spent ethnographically 'hanging-out' with young men in gyms, bars, clubs, trains and gay cruising grounds in India, this book critically reveals Indian...

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hyd...

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the transnational formation of the 'black Atlant...

From the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing.  Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that it was not always a common practice, we can devise bet...

In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Yale UP, 2020) tells for...

The vast range of choices we can make about our lives is one of the great blessings of modernity. But that very freedom makes it hard to know what to believe or where we belong. Even more difficult is that capitalism is constantly shaping our values and perceptions towards its own ethos. Perhaps there is a way out through making our worlds smaller. Guest:  Paul Froese is a Professor of Sociology a...